Everyone wants to work with amazing people and teams. Why? What does it mean for a team to be awesome?
Teams are the foundation of organizations. Today it is more than proven that we need to give autonomy to those closest to the work, the product, the service, the customer – this is a basic principle of agile. If you have an amazing team, you will have more chances of success.
For simple reasons:
- They know their role in the organization’s strategy
- Know the customer better than anyone
- They know the product or service that is delivered to the customer (they are the ones who create, build and take care of it)
- They know each other as a team, they have the intimacy to perceive the weaknesses and strengths of each person
- They carry out the process they created themselves, and constantly improve it.
- They deliver indicators and give full visibility to where they are and where they are going
So now the question remains: what makes a team amazing?
The culture
People make culture. When we hear someone say about a proposal for change, “this is not going to work here because of our culture”, we can translate that to, “it’s not going to work here because people don’t accept change, they fear the new, they look for culprits and not they recognize that everything can be better or different and thus achieve better results”.
For these reasons, to establish a business-friendly culture, we need to develop people around “healthy” and stable teams in an environment or system suited to each reality and purpose.
A team is a community where people meet, share, learn and grow together. How can someone belong to something that doesn’t have a name, image, purpose and values?
Maybe the purpose and values of the organization are too big for the team, they are inspired by the purpose of the organization and its values, but they need something closer, more personal and personalized.
We start shaping a team’s culture by defining its purpose. Every team needs a personality, a name, a brand and a reason to exist, that is, its purpose.
It is also important for the team to determine their values, principles that guide them in achieving their purpose.
Finally, it is vital that the team is clear about the roles each person should fill and their responsibilities (PO, Team Lead or Facilitator, Agile Master/Scrum Master, and a technical lead).
These elements are the basis for the formation of culture. Establishing culture must be a constant and tireless process, with the participation and collaboration of everyone.
The Practices
Practices represent the way the team operates. How they plan things, how they organize themselves, how they deal with blockages and difficulties and how they demonstrate their work through metrics and process visibility.
We cannot doubt the power of practices. Teams that organize well around practices are amazing teams.
Teams must have what the Tribal Unity book calls MVA (Minimal Viable Agility), the minimum practices for a team to function, which are:
- Planning or replenishment meeting
- Daily or stand up meeting
- Review / Delivery / Delivery presentation
- Retrospectives
Other important practices are:
- Delegation Board – maintain clarity on the level of authority and autonomy teams have. When boundaries are clear, we expand teams’ ability to create without fear of restrictions. Also the Delegation Board is an important tool to demonstrate to the team how much the organization is tolerant of learning through experimentation and failure.
- Moving Motivators – 3.0 management practice that identifies the motivations of team members. This practice helps to analyze changes and other issues that can impact the motivation of people and the team.
- Assessments/Strategic Retrospective – Assessments are deep questions that help the team to reflect on what is really going well and what actions should be prioritized for the team to reach new levels of maturity and performance.
- OKRs – Incredible teams use the Objectives and Goals (OKRs) model as a compass that guides the decisions and path the team is choosing. Your OKR must align with strategic objectives, the organization’s purpose, and your own purpose as a team.
- Clarity about roles and exercising about practices is vital for great teams.
- Incredible teams do not have practices as their goal but they continuously optimize and improve their processes using practices as successful tools, with continuous inspection and adaptation.
Clarity about roles and exercising about practices is vital for great teams.
Incredible teams do not have practices as their goal but they continuously optimize and improve their processes using practices as successful tools, with continuous inspection and adaptation.
The flow
Incredible teams have a lot of clarity about their Value Stream Mapping. That is, where the demand arises and where and how it is delivered and to whom.
From this flow, the team creates a framework that gives visibility to each step of this flow. The framework associated with some techniques will help the team to identify bottlenecks and continuously improve the process. Incredible teams think with each cycle how their flow can be leaner, simpler and better, delivering more value.
Some of these techniques associated with flow are:
- Wip Limit
- Blockage Handling
- Metrics (Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput)
- CFD – Cumulative Flow Diagram Analysis
Another important characteristic of incredible teams is their natural ability to dominate their products, services and demands. They are able to easily “break” activities at the ideal level in order to facilitate their predictability of delivery and start to have more assertiveness in their metrics efficiently.
Conclusion
Building amazing teams is a big challenge. This construction needs to be aligned with strategy and other structure initiatives throughout the organization.
Creating culture, establishing practices and flow are ways to build really agile teams with the right temperature to deliver value to the business.
The role of managers is essential to generate a system or environment that favors the development of teams and how to work hard on all issues so that the team feels safe to carry out its work.
The leader of each team has a key role in this process, connecting and leveraging these 3 characteristics of incredible teams.
Quoting the words of Seth Godin (writer and speaker), “a team is a group of people connected to each other, connected to a leader and connected to an idea.” This illustrates the importance of teams in developing truly agile organizations.
Count on the beefor!
The management platform has some agile practice tools on its platform that will help the manager to perform routine tasks focused on managing people and results. Discover and learn how some tools can help you on the journey: Moving Motivators , Niko Niko Calendar , Personal Mapping, and more!